"Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window." - Neal Stephenson
Dammit -- free markets and new technology do it again!
Not the best written piece in the world, nor the most tightly argued, but the underlying facts do certainly get at a certain truth: that things get better. For everybody.
Bread, for example (the production of which used to consume the vast majority of human labor for many thousands of years). What was once an 80-hour-a-week-job (growing wheat, turning it into bread), can how be had for $.99 at a corner store (or the equivalent of about ten minutes' work at minimum wage. The second argument being, science.
also -- and completely orthogonal -- while we're on the subject of strange pakistan doings, check out the curious tale of abdul qadir khan, the father of the pakistani nuclear bomb. i'll pull the old atlantic story and post in a few mins.
there's a long history of a sort of multi-faced foreign policy pursued by the disparate factions that exist amongst pakistani leadership. from the ISI to the military to the various political parties, there's just many folks who each have their own set of priorities. surely some of them were friendly to UBL, and they believed could be set as a tool against India, and other regional powers (cf mumbai and illyas kashmiri).
your best source of information on the byzantine warren of pak politics is the indomitable professor chris fair of georgetown university, whose twitter is here: https://twitter.com/CChristineFair and of course the by-now-standard literature of looming tower / ghost wars / &c.
Those interested in reading a more narrative-style recounting of Mr. Shannon's efforts ought pick up a copy of "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood" by James Gleick. It is one of the most fantastic books I have ever read. Informative, entertaining, engrossing. From Babbage's learning machines through the present, I can think of no better introduction to these critical concepts.
Not to state the obvious, but surge pricing is simply the most efficient way to motivate people on the platform (read: drivers) to flow into an underserved area (read: where the customers are). The macro take-away on this is that we should celebrate the fact that Uber is trying to incentivize its driving population to serve its riding population by implementing surge pricing. The opposite would be Lyft, which I doubt has any reasonable way other than asking nicely to try to encourage its drivers to venture into these underserved areas...
And yes, I understand that this opinion (read: "interpretation of the laws of supply and demand as they affect reality as it exists") is likely to be unpopular, and am prepared to be labeled all sorts of nasty things and downvoted.
@davemel37 I like where you're going with this, and I agree that this is a very good problem to address. I wonder if you could design some sort of system similar to Uber pricing algo where you give an estimate ("[Startupname] believes that this job will cost between $70 and $120"), and then include various multiples (I imagine that getting a window repaired in Menlo Park will cost more than doing so in Topeka, KS) for locality, current demand, etc.
isn't this what happens when you make something free? people use it to the maximum extent. this is the beauty of pricing. it allows supply to meet demand. imagine if "zero" turned into some reasonable multiple (say, the equivalent of one gigabyte of wikipedia for 1/1000th of an Angolan's annual salary). How many Angolans would chose to pay for this? To continue thinking down this road is to begin thinking along the lines of introductory economics. And interesting things happen. Imagine if Wikipedia were to show that this is a sustainable business model? If one million Angolans were to pay USD$1 for this annually, it would generate (hard math here, I know) a million dollars of revenue. That could do any number of things. Pay for a full-time staffer to work in the Angolan patois of Portuguese perhaps. Or even go to pay for building out basic infrastructure. Or it could serve as the seed funding of an MNVO that would provide greater services, at a reasonable cost, to Angolans. Just a thought.
which it to say: don't these type of pieces usually come out as part of a structured public relations campaign that culminates in an announcement that the company is for sale?
and to emphasize, socialism is in fact quite well defined -- especially national socialism (e.g. the Nazi Party of Germany). Here's a good overview of what socialism is, broadly speaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
and i agree and tell my friends who ask "so, AI this year?" that in fact we're a long way away. in fact, potentially infinitely long, if you think that while we may create simulacra of consciousness, without understanding what it means to be human (at least cognitively), we may never be able to create its digital parallel.
Let us now pause, and write in praise of POI. Not for any political reason (Snowden, et. al.), but because the writers have created genuine science fiction. I can't recall who said it -- perhaps one of the greats (ACC, PKD) -- but good scifi takes the world as it is, and changes one very small thing (in this case: genuine AI). Such a pleasure to watch. I know, I know, many folks on HN will point out technical shortcomings, but as someone who has straddled these many worlds (natsec, digital security, privacy), I see them reflected here in a glorious alternative universe that is thought provoking, entrancing, mesmerizing.
Great article, and the best is Musk's response. Just one more example of how, ala Allison and Zeilkow's "Essence of Decision," so much of what happens in industrial organizations ("industrial" in the philosophical sense -- meaning organizations with hierarchies, divisions, etc.) is motivated not by the overall interest of the organization (cf. Musk's response), but rather of the more parochial needs of the individual managers. Which is to say someone within the Tesla organization, fearful of an error they made, sought to retaliate against the guy -- even though the retaliation was unauthorized, and even counterproductive. An amazing use case for how Twitter, when optimally utilized as a total free-speech zone, can really help move the world forward, as things like this enable information to percolate directly to the top without winding its way through the "mittelebureaucracy."
the most frustrating part of this whole thing is the multi-headed response by various agency chieftains. fbi says one thing. nsa says another. former generals say another.
am i crazy to want the president step up and say: "our position as a government is: x"? there's no/no way this has escaped his notice. isn't that part of the job description of "leader of the free world?"
Agree agree agree. He's bidding for the sort of intellectual immortality with Antigragile. The Fat Tony dialogues are really a pleasure, and a throwback to Plato's Dialogues. Really enjoyable, meaty stuff.
I think it is his best. If you want the hack, listen to it on tape first before reading it. You'll realize he's quite nuanced in his arguments, and really operating intellectually amongst the greats -- not simple econo-self-help sort of stuff, but really deep thoughts abut heuristics, tradition, human society, evolution, etc.
Actually given the 80/20 support-to-operator ratio throughout the wars, I would say this is actually quite representative of what most people's experience in the recent wars.